If Mary Shelley were alive today she would be a “Famous
Author”. Publishers would be fighting over the rights to all her
work, she would travel the world on endless promotion tours and
become rich on film rights. As a single mother she would be
applauded; the hint of scandal in her private life could only
enhance her reputation; and any connection to famously
intellectual, philosophical and socially radical parents would
probably be hushed up so as not to frighten off the masses.

Instead of this, in Mary Shelley’s own lifetime and for years
afterwards the opposite was true. So now, although everyone has
heard of Frankenstein (generally believed to be the monster), not
many could tell you the name of the author of the book from which
he came and very few would be aware of that author’s many other
published works. As well as her novels – Frankenstein: or the
Modern Prometheus, Matilda, Valpergo, The
Last Man, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck,
Ladore and Falkner – Mary Shelley published two
plays, many stories for children and adults, travel writing,
biographical essays of famous Europeans and numerous articles.
She also edited and annotated several editions of her husband’s
poetry and prose. Her husband was, of course, Percy Bysshe
Shelley.

Not all of Mary Shelley’s work, as Miranda Seymour notes in
this excellent biography, was great work. Much of it was mundane
hack-work which Mary undertook in order to support herself, her
surviving son (Percy Florence Shelley), her father and
step-mother and various other relatives who made claims on her.
Throughout her life, Mary worked incredibly hard but only
Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, published in 1817
when she was only nineteen, was truly successful. Even this book
was originally published anonymously and she made little money
from it and none at all from the successful dramatization of it
by Richard Brinsley Peake which appeared on stage in 1823.

So, if Mary Shelley’s later work was less brilliant than
Frankenstein, why do we need a biography? Is it because of
her marriage to Percy Bysshe Shelley, her friendship with Lord
Byron and her allegedly scandalous life? Is it because at
sixteen, along with her fifteen-year-old step-sister Claire
Clairmont, she ran away from home to live with a married poet
whose pregnant wife later drowned herself in the Serpentine in
Hyde Park?

Miranda Seymour tells us frankly that her reasons for writing
this biography began with the woman and with questions which her
own life experiences raised about the usual picture of Mary
Shelley. How, she wondered, could a young woman described as
bad-tempered, a relentless social climber and a nagging wife also
be someone whose hard work, courage and determination supported
herself and her family and who was responsible for establishing
her dead husband’s reputation as a poet. Mary was a woman whose
intense loyalty to her friends survived their betrayal of her; a
woman whose idealistic disregard of social conventions only made
her own life harder. Consider, too, Mary’s parentage (she was the
daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Vindication of the
Rights of Women was published in1792, and William Godwin,
whose Enquiry Concerning the Nature of Political Justice
was one of the most influential arguments for a society of equals
of his time); she lived at a time when Europe was in
revolutionary turmoil; she travelled widely and chose to live in
Europe until forced to return to England; and she mixed with
people like Coleridge, Byron, Scott, Trelawney, Disraeli, Lady
Blessington and Caroline Norton. Seymour’s curiosity was piqued.
The usual picture of Mary just did not seem right.

Clearly, this biography has been a quest for answers to some
of the puzzles and contradictions which prompted Seymour to begin
it. Equally clearly it has been a labour of love. Diligently and
meticulously researched as it is, it is still absorbing and very
easy-to-read. And the portrait of Mary Shelley which it reveals
is of “a woman who struggled all her life against the
unpredictability of her own nature”; a woman who was clever,
idealistic, and often misguided in her choice of friends; a woman
who was distraught by the deaths of all but one of her children
and who suffered from bouts of clinical depression, yet “seldom
revealed her unhappiness and continued, until the end of her
life, to work to win Shelley, never herself, the honour she felt
was his due”. A remarkable woman.

There is no doubt, given Seymour’s summary of the various ways
in which Mary’s life was presented to the world after her death,
that some rebalancing was due. There is no doubt, too, that it is
good to place Mary in the context of the changing times in which
she lived and that her strong, independent views on society and
politics strongly influenced her life and were reflected in her
work. But whether Seymour’s understanding and her generous
conclusions about Mary will be the final picture is doubtful -
there will always be another possible side to the story.

Biography is immensely popular with readers but it is well to
remember that it is, as the differences of opinion amongst Mary
Shelley’s biographers demonstrates, a subjective art. At worst,
it panders to prurient interest in the private lives of others.
At best, it is reliant on limited factual evidence about its
subject, on the subjective comment of friends and relatives, and
on the biographer’s own selective interpretation and presentation
of the available material.

Miranda Seymour’s biography of Mary Shelley is of the latter
kind, and it is as objective and factual as it is possible to be
without becoming dry and boring. Seymour wrote it with the
general reader in mind and it is enjoyable, varied and easy
reading.

Scholars, too, will find Seymour’s discussion of Mary’s work
and some new suggestions of Mary’s sources for
Frankenstein of interest, and her Bibliography and Notes
valuable. The Notes, however, are frustratingly organized by
chapter only, without the added assistance of page numbers; and
the Index is badly arranged with long, compressed chronological
(rather than alphabetical) lists of sub-topics under, for
example, major headings like “Frankenstein” or “Mary Shelley”. It
is a pity that such irritations should mar a well-researched and
well-written book.